Rolling in the Deep (7 page)

“Captain Seghers, we have a problem.”

Jovanie turned away from her breakfast and toward the anxious-looking crewman standing in her cabin door. He was flushed and panting slightly; he had clearly run some distance to reach her. A small pang of fear blossomed in her chest. The voyage had been too peaceful; it was inevitable that things would start going wrong. But oh, she had hoped that just this once, inevitability could be staved off by the need for a peaceful trip.

“Is this about Robert Warwick?” she asked, unable to keep the hope out of her voice. Maybe her wayward crewman had been found sleeping off a bender in one of the unoccupied cabins, and she would just need to provide some stern discipline. Actually, that would be a best-case scenario. She’d had crewmembers searching the decks until almost three in the morning, and they had found no sign of the man. It was unnerving. The
Atargatis
was a big ship, but it was still just a ship. It shouldn’t have been possible for someone to disappear that completely without going overboard, and while there were sharks in these waters, she found it difficult to accept that a human being, even one who had somehow managed to fall in and drown, could vanish without a trace. The currents weren’t strong enough where they were anchored, and the seas had been calm since they arrived.

“No, Captain,” said the man. “One of the mermaids is missing.”

Jovanie blinked at him, trying to force those words to make sense. There were no mermaids. This was a trip about finding mermaids, and everyone aboard knew that they were going to fail. They might find some “evidence,” and they might find the women in costume, but—

The women in costume. “Do you mean one of the performers?” she asked.

The crewman nodded. “Yes. They were doing their morning exercises off the rear deck—their contract apparently specifies that they have access to the open water whenever the ship is not in motion—and one of their people didn’t resurface.”

Oh, God. Captain Jovanie Seghers jerked to her feet so quickly that her chair went over backward, landing on the cabin floor with a clatter. “Notify the divers. I want bodies in the water in five minutes. We need to find that woman.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” said the crewman, and was gone, running back down the deck. He knew as well as she did that sending divers in was an empty gesture; if the woman had been missing long enough for her fellow performers to raise the alarm, she was surely lost. But if they could bring the body back, her friends might at least have some closure.

Accidents can happen at sea. Accidents
will
happen at sea, as inevitable as the waves and the weather. All that could be changed was how people reacted to them, and what they did to prevent specific accidents from happening again.

The interns and early-rising scientists who were already out on the deck watched in confusion as the crew began to mobilize. More people than most of them had realized were on the
Atargatis
had already run toward the rear of the boat, and it seemed like the rush was never-ending. “Should I be concerned?” asked Alexandra, glancing toward Anne and Kevin, who had just arrived from the mess.

Anne was back to her usual focus group-tested and approved self, somehow having managed to put on a full face of perfect makeup using her reflection on the side of a coffee pot. This skill, among others, was why she was Imagine’s most popular convention correspondent. She had once fixed her lipstick in the shine off a Wolverine cosplayer’s claws. “I don’t know,” she said, watching another man push past. She itched to go after them, but was all too aware of the clause in her contract that forbade her to interfere with the crew. If there was one thing Anne did
not
want, it was to be confined to quarters for the rest of the voyage. Her job would surely be one of the casualties of that particular punishment.

Kevin, who was less concerned with his continuing employment with Imagine, and—more importantly—much more of a morning person, frowned. “They’re all heading for the back of the ship,” he said. “I hope nothing went wrong with the Blue Seas girls.”

“You mean the professional mermaids that we officially do not know are associated with this voyage?” asked Professor Harris, looking up and adjusting his glasses. He cast a wicked smile at the nearest cameramen, who were all, apart from Kevin, scowling at him. Mention of the mermaids meant immediate deletion of their footage, and a lot of manual editing to scrub the idea from the scene. “Open-sea swimming is never safe, but those women struck me as extremely professional. As long as they didn’t run afoul of a shark, they should be fine.”

“Are there sharks in these waters, Professor?” asked Anne.

Professor Harris hesitated. Then, apparently taking mercy on the cameramen who were waiting for his reply, he said, “There are sharks in all waters, my dear. This is their home, not ours, and we should treat it as such. Now, I have not seen the diversity of shark populations in these waters that I would have expected—but I have also not sent down the majority of my cameras yet, or chummed the waves to attract our fine, finny friends.”

“So would you say that you’d expected to find more sharks here than you have?” pressed Anne. The rushing crewmen were forgotten in her dogged pursuit of something that actually fit the documentary’s pre-constructed narrative.

Kevin almost envied her. He could never forget the real world as quickly as she could, and he
liked
those professional mermaids. No matter how hard he tried to focus, he couldn’t ignore the fact that the crew was rushing toward the spot where he had last seen the ladies in the water, and none of them seemed to be coming back.

“Yes, actually,” said Peter. “I was definitely expecting to have picked up signs of local shark activity by now. We’re sampling all levels of the local water, and cameras have started going down, but no sharks. It’s odd. This is clean, open ocean, with very little pollution and very high levels of the protein tags and chemicals that indicate a healthy ecosystem. So where are the predators?”

“Part of the issue with looking for sharks and other large predators in a place like this is the depth,” said Sonja, getting in on the action. The curly-haired cetologist looked bright and alert, despite the early hour. She was probably one of those people who didn’t really
need
to sleep, thought Anne sourly, and promptly forgot about her irritation in the face of the story. “We can’t go down to the sea floor to check for signs that they’ve been there, because we can’t actually
get
to the sea floor.”

“I thought sharks hung out near the surface,” said Anne. “You know, like the shark from
Jaws
.”

Professor Weinstein made a pained face. “There are a lot of things about the shark from
Jaws
that aren’t scientifically accurate. You can find sharks at all levels of the sea, but a surprising number of them like to swim along the bottom. It’s more energy-efficient, and there’s plenty down there to eat. Big apex predators like the Great White are relatively rare in the world of sharks. Smaller, more discriminating species are much more common.”

“We’re sending down the fish cameras today, and we should hopefully pick up any local shark species on our monitors,” said Sonja. Then she smiled wickedly. “Who knows? We might even find a mermaid.”

Kevin frowned. The scientists were laughing, and even Anne seemed interested and engaged, although it was hard to tell with her: so much of her job involved looking interested that sometimes he thought she hadn’t paid honest attention to anything in years. And yet he couldn’t manage to forget the professional mermaids frolicking in the water, or bring himself to ignore the passing crewmen.

What was going on back there?

The last of the
Atargatis
divers surfaced and swam back to the guard rope, shaking his head. Captain Seghers watched from the deck, her hands clenched tight around the rail. David stood beside her, his head bowed. After an hour of increasingly desperate dives, it was clear that the missing mermaid was not going to be found.

David tapped Jovanie on the arm. She turned to look at him, and he signed, ‘Do you want to tell her friends?’

She sighed. ‘No,’ she signed back. ‘I hate this part of my job.’

‘I could tell them.’

Jovanie raised an eyebrow. ‘How?’

‘I could write them a note. They wouldn’t get offended if it was from me.’ David shrugged. ‘Sometimes I have to work with what I’ve got.’

‘No, that’s all right, but thank you for offering. I’m the Captain. I’ll tell them.’ Jovanie sighed again, shaking her head. ‘This is horrible.’

‘I know,’ said David. He put a hand on her arm for a moment, lending her as much support as he could through that small contact. He and Jovanie had been friends for years, and he knew that despite her often tough exterior, things like this tore her up inside. She loved the sea. She loved her crew. She hated those moments where everything seemed to go wrong, and she was the one standing to accept the blame.

Sunnie had been waiting by the rail, watching the divers go down and come up empty-handed. Somehow that was worse. If they had come up with Jessica’s body, at least there would have been closure for the remaining ladies of the Blue Seas: at least they would have known for sure. But no matter how many times the divers descended into the blue, they returned without a pale body in their arms, without even a scrap of a brightly colored neoprene tail. Whatever had happened to Jessica, it had happened so quickly and so completely that it had left them nothing but an absence to mourn.

She watched as the captain and her first mate exchanged a rapid flurry of signs, their hands moving too fast for her to follow. Sunnie had some experience with ASL. One of their former mermaids, Hallie, had been a certified interpreter who eventually chose to hang up her fins and go into working for the Deaf community full time. The small handful of signs that Hallie had taught to her co-workers didn’t include any of the signs Sunnie could pick out of the flurry of dancing fingers, but she did know enough to know that whatever was being discussed, it wasn’t something that could be talked about calmly.

Then Captain Seghers stepped away from her companion, and Sunnie knew. She stood frozen as the other, smaller woman walked down the deck toward her. The Captain opened her mouth.

“Please.” The word was half spoken, half moaned; it escaped from Sunnie’s lips almost without her consent, hanging in the air between them. “Please, don’t say it. Say that you’re still looking. Say that you’re going to try something else. Say that this is a joke. Just please, don’t say it.”

“You have my sincere condolences for your loss,” said the captain. She sounded sad. That was good. She
should
be sad. They had been swimming alongside
her
boat; whatever had happened to Jess, it had happened in the shadow of the
Atargatis
.

The thoughts were weak and petty, and Sunnie regretted them as soon as they were fully formed. Captain Seghers hadn’t ordered them into the water, and their contract with Imagine had been very upfront about the dangers of swimming in an area this uncharted, this untouched by man. They had signed up anyway, for the money, and for the experience of swimming in an ocean where no other professional mermaid had ever set fin. She could be angry. She could be devastated. But blaming Captain Seghers wasn’t fair, and she refused to let grief make her into someone she wasn’t.

“We knew the risks,” Sunnie said. “
She
knew the risks. Thank you for your sympathy, but she died the way she would have wanted to—with her fins on and the whole ocean in front of her. Just…please, do you know if the divers will be able to find her body? Her family would very much appreciate it if we could bring her home.”

“I don’t know,” said Captain Seghers. “If you want my honest opinion, I don’t think so. The water is too deep here, and there’s too much of it. They weren’t able to find her quickly enough, and by now, even if she wasn’t taken by something, she’s too far away for us to find.”

“Taken?” asked Sunnie, before she could stop herself.

Captain Seghers managed not to wince. “It was a poor choice of words. You have my apologies. These waters are known to be home to a wide range of predators. Sharks, squid, anglerfish…I’m sorry to have put it so baldly, but by now, those predators will have definitely found her. We will not be able to recover her body. I am sorry.”

“I see.” Sunnie closed her eyes for a moment. She could still see Jess, the sunlight shining off her hair, laughing as she joined her fellow mermaids in the sea. It was a painful thing to look at. She opened her eyes again. “Thank you for your honesty. May we have access to the main dining room tonight? We’ll want to hold a memorial for her.”

Jovanie nodded. “I will talk to Mr. Curran and make sure that Imagine is cleared out of the room for the night. If there are any issues, they’ll go through me.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s the least we can do.” Jovanie forced herself to look the other woman in the eye before turning on her heel and walking back toward David. It was time to pull her divers out of the water and notify Imagine that the mermaids would be using the cafeteria for the evening. There were times, like these, when she genuinely regretted her decision to become the captain of a passenger vessel. She could have run a garbage scow. She could have operated a container ship.